Soldier of Fortune

ICE PEOPLE/ASHOK CHADHA

This army man's son turned his back on his family's preference for government service by joining the nascent IT industry of the mid-1980s. Four months ago when Ashok Chadha quit one of India's largest third-party offshore BPO providers to join a niche player, he was probably carrying the same piece of baggage that he was two decades ago: "the urge to do more and better".

As president and country head for San Francisco-headquartered Global Vantedge, Chadha oversees the company's 1,200-executive Gurgaon call centre specialising in credit and receivables. That's quite a change from his previous job as associate COO at Wipro Spectramind where he ran end-to-end service delivery for multiple processes and managed around 4,000 people.

As one of the core team that helped build Spectramind, Chadha has learnt that focus and not a brand name is necessary to build a company. Chadha believes that specialised Indian companies stand at the cusp of enormous growth: "The industry will consolidate and mature into a much bigger entity. The IT services sector will soon see a new high in terms of people it will employ and contribution to GDP."

The $10 million Global Vantedge expects a four-fold growth over the next one year in India. Asked about his biggest hurdle so far, the XLRI graduate replies: "Finding experts from India who were comfortable in a niche domain like credit and receivable management was tough."

Chadha believes the BPO industry is the best thing to have happened to India. His reckoning: "Which other industry would give you an opportunity to become a vice-president at 32 and a chance to own a thousand-people company by your 40s? One should thank this sunrise industry, which has developed a confident and professionally robust generation."

Spoken like a true soldier's son.